I had big plans to blog this holiday season. Wanted to share our winter village setup and what LEGO events we attended, but family comes first. This blog is called “The Family Brick” after all, and I wanted to make sure I attended to family. So you may get a flurry of Christmas related blog posts this January, starting with this…

As you may or may not know, LEGO releases new sets on the 1st of every year. We were particularly excited, as we’ve been looking forward to building the new LEGO Creator Detective’s Office along with collecting the next series of LEGO minifigures. Also, we knew the new LEGO Disney Elsa’s Sparkling Ice Castle was getting released, which The Little Brick would be over the moon excited to build.

So, instead of partying it up on New Year’s Eve, we decided to stay in with some tacos, cider and banana cream pie, binge watch the whole “The Flash” series and call it the new year at a semi-decent hour. All this, so we could get up early, grab some breakfast and be at the front door of our local LEGO store when the clock struck 10am. As it happens, this was about all we could do, as we were exhausted from the week and an unexpected family event that left us with less a desire to party.

The night in was well worth it, as when we made it to the LEGO store at 10:05am. Surprisingly, there were already at least 20 people in the store making their New Year’s purchases. I really should have taken a picture of it… it was incredible.

In a matter of minutes, we saw 4 of the LEGO Creator Detective’s Office sets fly off the shelf. With worries of our sets selling out immediately, we quickly got our hands on the sets we wanted to take home.

Our haul was grand indeed.

Not only did we get our sets, but LEGO was running several polybag specials for the month of January. We managed to score 3 additional polybags in addition to getting our Brick Specialist Minifigure polybag with the coupon that came in the exclusive LEGO calendar with December 2014 purchases.

Now you’re probably thinking, “Holy cow! That’s a lot of money there!” and yes, it was. But we were fortunate enough to have a few sets on hand we wanted to exchange (from birthday/Christmas gifts). The Little Brick also got a set from us for Christmas which she opted to swap out for Elsa’s castle.

While I was waiting for the family to take it all in, I was standing behind the cash registers (our store has a ledge and build area there for those purchasing brick wall pieces). If you thought my purchase was large, there was a gentleman checking out a few people before us that had about 2 of each of the newly relaunched Bionicle sets, the detective office and a full set of the new minifigure series among other things. His total came close to $600! Crazy!

And as it turns out, I had to return to the store after we already left and were close to home. In all the excitement, I failed to notice the employee who rung us up forgot to scan our VIP member card, so we missed out on our points. After dropping the family off, I went back to the store to get the points issue corrected (it was, after all, a rather large purchase).

I couldn’t help but to pick up a few more things.

In my defense, nothing in the first purchase was for me specifically… well, maybe the flower cart, which I have plans to modify into a piragua cart…mmm flavored shaved ice. So while I was really looking forward to the LEGO Friends Heartlake Hot Air Balloon, once in hand, I was a bit disappointed with the build.  I opted instead for the LEGO Friends Heartlake Lighthouse. Lots of cute details… not to mention, I kinda like lighthouses. I will eventually get the LEGO Friends Emma’s House, because I particularly like the architecture and the numerous windows, but since it’s a $70 purchase, I’ll wait until we need another large purchase for the next neat polybag.

Yesterday was like Christmas all over again. “Second Christmas”, to steal the term from a LEGO employee.

How about you… did you make a special trip to shop at the LEGO store on the 1st or maybe you tried Shop@Home (which I heard was all sold out)? What did you pick up?